IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

The “Eclipse” of architecture
D. Neves dos Santos 1 , Prof. Manuel Mendes (tutor) 2 .
1 Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
2 Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
The concept of eclipse applied to architecture emerged in the course of a study of an
influent house –C. S. H. #8 (1945-1949), the only house designed by (and for) Charles and
Ray Eames, promoted by Arts&Architecture magazine within the Case Study House
Program. Marked by a doubt between two different solutions for the same site, were left
contradictory documents about the Eames idea of architecture. If on the one hand it says
that architecture could be a virtuous composition of forms legitimated by a style directly
imported from the authors of the modern movement; on the other hand, caused by
contingents (or taking the most out of them), one can see that Eames took a different
position in view of architecture because, on the built house, the most sublime moments of
architecture were recorded as a form’s eclipses and never as a form’s exhibition.
Motivated by this hesitation, we found space to question and propose a new statement in
view of most elementary matters underlying the architecture exercise: which is the
subject/purpose of our discipline? What kind of knowledge could inform the conception
according to those purposes? How can architecture, under that purpose, be represented?
How can architecture be materialized?
Nevertheless, the analysis’s field to which theses question are linked is not limited by dates
or geographic places where some historical incident has happened. The criteria that bound
the fields of our action is a criteria made by the “time” of daily life architecture. No one
more than Charles and Ray Eames left such a large influence by an unique collection made
by a million of fragmentary and causal records exposing the ordinary moments of their
architecture mixed with their everyday life. We are interested in facts that are out of the
famous moment of inauguration or when Julius Shulman was at Eames House to make the
famous photo that everybody recognizes as CSH #8. Looking at that house through images
of a time that is a time of living, we realise that architecture as an object was softly
disappearing from photos, drawings or other records of that house, as we can confirm on
House-after five Years of Living (1954) - the Eames`s most relevant document about the
house ). With the passing of time, the object of a house looses the leading role representing
architecture and it is replaced by “the things” that this object made possible, because for
Eames, architecture is something beyond it’s projects, it’s records and it’s objects.
Architecture is a “private landscape”.
Through an Eames eye, we describe the possibility: architecture could be an immaterial
product, more influenced by actions than proportion. Consequently, we found an apparent
contradiction on architectural representation: drawings, models, renders infer a
constructive description of landscape that is always on movement, evanescent…and made
of spatial story. So, the representation betrays the reality in the same way that
representation betrays architecture. This special attention given to architecture, beyond the
inauguration or “photo days”, has an apparent price: became invisible. Eclipsed. This
invisibility is not humble because the ambition is simultaneously unmeasured: to find
happiness through experiencing the space that we project or through observing water
draining into the school’s courtyard. Isn’t it Mr. and Mrs. Eames?
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